I once got my left arm caught in a bailing machine at an old NW Portland bindery. It was my first night on the job, the safety cage was wired out and my hand got caught on a piece of wire or something else in the bail as the massive plunger came down to compress it. It took my arm in, but thankfully it was a near full bail and I could contort my joints enough to keep from breaking anything. It compressed all the bones in my hand, wrist, and forearm without breaking any of them. It released me as a matter of its course, I went to the hospital, and I was back at work in a sling, pushing a broom with my good arm, before the shift was over. Those seconds, between when I realized what was happening, what was going to happen, and that I could do nothing about it and the actual compression are among some of the longest of my life.

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"In her new memoir, Martha Grover goes undercover. Whether cleaning houses or looking for love, she peels back the surfaces of ordinary moments and reveals a life both hilarious and traumatic. The End of My Career sees Grover living with her parents again as she enters her late thirties, reconciling the pleasures and perils of being female, chronically ill, and subsisting on menial labor at the edge of an increasingly unaffordable city. Desperate for stable work, she gets hired as a state-sanctioned private investigator looking into shady workers’ comp claims—even while she herself fights in court for her own disability settlement. Angry and heartbroken, brimming with the outrageous contradictions of the modern world, The End of My Career embodies the comic nightmare of our times."